The meeting was held on Wednesday 3rd November at the Gateway Auditorium In Borella, Colombo. The meeting was due to start at 18:00 but the start was delayed until 18:30 due to traffic problems. I'd say around 40 people attended. Merill, as always , kicked off the proceedings by introducing the two speakers for the evening Howard & Prasanna.
Presentation By Howard Lo (30 Minutes)
Howard gave a short presentation on the MVP award including some slides of the 4 Sri Lanka MVPs. He then moved on to demonstrating some of the cool features of tablet PCs. One interesting product was an office add-on only available in Japan which would convert a person's portrait photograph into a cartoon format. The demonstration of the physics application was particularly impressive. In just a few minutes Howard created some pendulum objects, attached them to a surface object, added a gravity property and then started them swinging by the click of a button. Other objects could be added and these would bounce off the pendulums and off other drawn surfaces. Excellent fun! Howard also showed how 3D objects could be drawn onto a tablet page and then manipulated so that they could be spun round, just as though they were real 3D objects.
Presentation By Amirthalingam Prasanna (60 minutes)
Prasanna's presentation was about Test Driven Development (TDD), the center piece of which was a demonstration of how to create a .NET project using NUnit, a free tool. This is a subject I had read about and put on my ToDo list to look into in more detail a while ago so I was looking forward to Prasanna's presentation. I was not disappointed. Prasanna gave a detailed, step by step demonstration on how to utilise both Visual Studio and NUnit to use TDD to create a simple banking class from scratch. Prasanna backed his demonstration up with slides and covered a number of other associated topics including when and when not to use unit testing and some of the shortfalls and pitfalls of using this approach. After this excellent presentation I have placed TDD to the top of my ToDo list and hope to have a proper look at it this weekend.
Conclusion
At the end of the meeting Merill made a few announcements:
- There is to be an ASOCIO IT exhibition where the Colombo .NET User Group will have a stall between Wednesday December 1st & Saturday December 4th. Volunteers will be required to help run the stall.
- There is also to be a .NET Code Hero coding competition held over the next month with the winners announced at the IT exhibition. here will be two categories, Students and Non-Students.
Details for both will be announced on the Sri Lanka .NET Forum shortly.
On the way out Colombo .NET User Group badges and Visual Basic Resource Kit CDs were handed out, compliments of Microsoft.